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from British extermination in this remote hinterland-are miserably poor. Their plight is a blot on the administration of any government of a civilised country.

A tenant's son in Carraroe made up his mind to marry without consulting the landlord or his agent. The rent of the holding was raised five pounds as a fine. Two sons of another tenant got married and were allotted an outhouse to live in. With perfect consistency the fine in this case was ten pounds. Another tenant— Andrew Conneely-paying five pounds a year had his rent doubled. His brother who had an adjoining holding was, through adverse circumstances, a defaulter for one year's rent; Andrew got the option of paying his brother's ten pounds in addition to his own or of being evicted. These and many other hardships, combined with bad harvests, maddened the flannel-coated men and women of Connemara to revolt.

Roads were cut up, barricades raised, and men, women and children massed. The process-server emerged from the barrack and the first intended victim was a Mrs. Maickle. As the official approached her house with his escort he was assailed by the women and children, his "process" was torn up, and he was in danger of bodily hurt. The "force" approached Mrs. Maickle's, who had prepared for them a big burning turf with which she hit the District Inspector of Police. A bayonet charge followed; many women and children were wounded; the men, who had up to now been spectators, joined in the fray, and the police were routed. This was on Friday. Extra forces were called in, totalling finally about two hundred and fifty. The people also exerted themselves, and on Monday some two thousand men were assembled, with others near by in reserve. The police were in a trap. Had they persisted in their effort to enable the process-server to deliver his notices the bridges would have been cut and return to their headquarters would have been impossible. Armed with weapons of precision, they might have done considerable slaughter of the unarmed peasantry before being annihilated, but, fortunately, matters were not forced to a bloody issue. While the "force" remained they had a hungry time of it. Needy as were the people, no sum of money could purchase food or service for the police. Legal methods were adopted in other cases. The League supplied the funds for the defence of the tenants: the whole facts of the case—rent, valuation and other circumstances were brought out in public, and very often the landlord lost in law more than he could possibly gain in rent. The League saw to it that after an eviction took place the land would remain tenantless and profitless. The

policy was to pay the rent for one holding in a district and on this consolidate the evicted, who would, thus, have some scanty subsistence and be near at hand to repel any attempt to grab their holdings.

An interesting meeting was held at Straide, County Mayo, on February 1st, 1880. The platform was erected on the very site of Davitt's home from which he was cast on the roadside at the age of five. In the course of a powerful address, Davitt said: "Can a more eloquent denunciation of an accursed land code be found than what is witnessed here in this depopulated district? In the memory of many now listening to my words that peaceful little stream which meanders by the outskirts of this multitude sang back the merry voices of happy children and wended its way through a once populous and prosperous village. Now, however, the merry sounds are gone, the busy hum of hamlet life is hushed in sad desolation, for the hands of the home-destroyers have been here and performed their hellish work, leaving Straide but a name to mark the place where happy homesteads once stood, and whence an inoffensive people were driven to the four corners of the earth by the ruthless decree of landlordism. How often in a strange land has my boyhood's ear drunk in the tale of outrage and wrong and infamy perpetrated here in the name of English laws, and in the interest of territorial greed; in listening to the accounts of famine and sorrow, of deaths by starvation, of coffinless graves, of scenes

"On highway side, where oft was seen
The wild dog and the vulture keen
Tug for the limbs and gnaw the face

Of some starved child of our Irish race.

"It is no little consolation to know, however, that we are here to-day doing battle against a doomed monopoly, and that the power which has so long domineered over Ireland and its people is brought to its knees at last, and on the point of being crushed for ever, and if I am standing to-day upon a platform erected over the ruins of my levelled home, I may yet have the satisfaction of trampling on the ruins of Irish landlordism."

English statesmanship has never regarded any Irish question other than as a possible electioneering device. Disraeli wrote in 1874:

"Neither liberty of the press nor liberty of the person exists in Ireland. Arrests are at all times liable. It is a fact that at any time in Ireland the police may enter into your house, examine your papers to see if there is any resemblance between the writing and

that of some anonymous letter that has been sent to a third person. In Ireland, if a man writes an article in a newspaper, and it offends the Government, he has a warning, and if he repeats the offence his paper may be suppressed. They say Ireland is peaceful. Yes, but she is so, not because she is contented, but because she is held under by coercive laws. These laws may be necessary. I am not here objecting to them. I am a Tory, and as such I might favour severer laws myself. But I say it isn't honest in the Liberals, while denouncing us, to imitate our ways."

Already he had written in 1844:

A

"I want to see a public man corne forward and say what the Irish question is. One says it is a physical question; another a spiritual. Now it is the absence of the aristocracy; now the absence of railways. It is the Pope one day and potatoes the next. dense population in extreme distress inhabit an island where there is an established church which is not their church; and a territorial aristocracy, the richest of whom live in a distant capital. Thus they have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, an alien church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world. Well, what then would honourable gentlemen say if they were reading of a country in that position? They would say at once, 'The remedy is revolution.' But the Irish could not have a revolution, and why? Because Ireland is connected with another and more powerful country. Then what is the consequence? The connection with England became the cause of the present state of Ireland. If the connection with England prevented a revolution, and a revolution was the only remedy, England logically is in the odious position of being the cause of all the misery of Ireland. What, then, is the duty of an English minister? To effect by his policy all those changes which a revolution would do by force. That is the Irish question in its entirety."

Disraeli was twice premier in the meantime. In 1880 as Lord Beaconsfield he made Ireland, then more unsettled than ever, the basis of his appeal to the electorate. "The arts of agitators," he wrote, "which represented that England instead of being the generous and sympathising friend, was indifferent to the dangers and sufferings of Ireland, have been defeated by the measures, at once liberal and prudent, which Parliament have almost unanimously sanctioned."

Of a thousand answers to this manifesto we just pause to give one. Mulhall's Dictionary of Statistics gives the details year by year (taken from official British sources) of the number of Irish families evicted from 1849 to 1882; and the thirty-three years'

total of officially reported evictions (which fall far short of the full number) is 482,000 families. Since a low average for each family in the mountain d'stricts of Ireland would be father, mother and six children, this represents the appalling total of 3,856,000 creatures cast out to starve or die in a third of a century.

And the measures "at once liberal and prudent" during the half century from Catholic Emancipation 1829 to 1879 (the year before that in which Lord Beaconsfield spoke) are detailed in Michael Davitt's "Fall of Feudalism in Ireland." First are given the ameliorative measures offered in the British Parliament in Ireland's behalf-and next the measures that she received. Summing up the first it is shown that of the forty-nine ameliorative measures put forward in the fifty years, five were withdrawn, seven were rejected, twenty-one were dropped, fifteen proved abortive-and the grand total of one of the forty-nine was passed!

Then, the following is a list of acts "at once liberal and prudent" which the British Parliament, with "almost unanimous sanction," did bestow upon Ireland in those years:

1830 Importation of Arms Act.
1831 Whiteboy Act.
1831 Stanley's Arms Act.
1832 Arms and Gunpowder Act.
1833 Suppression of Disturbance.
1833 Change of Venue Act.
1834 Disturbances Amendment
and Continuance.

1834 Arms and Gunpowder Act.
1835 Public Peace Act.
1836 Another Arms Act.
1838 Another Arms Act.

1839 Unlawful Oaths Act.
1840 Another Arms Act.
1841 Outrages Act.
1841 Another Arms Act.
1843 Another Arms Act.

1843 Act Consolidating all Previ-
ous Coercion Acts.

1848 Another Oaths Act.

1849 Suspension of Habeas Corpus.
1850 Crime and Outrage Act.
1851 Unlawful Oaths Act.
1853 Crime and Outrage Act.
1854 Crime and Outrage Act.
1855 Crime and Outrage Act.
1856 Peace Preservation Act.
1858 Peace Preservation Act.
1860 Peace Preservation Act.
1862 Peace Preservation Act.
1862 Unlawful Oaths Act.
1865 Peace Preservation Act.
1866 Suspension of Habeas Corpus
Act (August).

1844 Unlawful Oaths Act.
1845 Unlawful Oaths Act.
1846 Constabulary Enlargement.
1847 Crime and Outrage Act.
1848 Treason Amendment Act.
1848 Removal of Arms Act.
1848 Suspension of Habeas Corpus.

1866 Suspension of Habeas Corpus.
1867 Suspension of Habeas Corpus.
1868 Suspension of Habeas Corpus.
1870 Peace Preservation Act.
1871 Protection of Life and Prop-
erty.

1871 Peace Preservation Con.
1873 Peace Preservation Act.
1875 Peace Preservation Act.
1875 Unlawful Oaths Act (lasting
until 1879).

CHAPTER LXXIV

THE LAND LEAGUE

THE funds of the Land League and of other organisations enabled the Western people to put in good seed in 1880, and there was every prospect of a good harvest. Suddenly, in March, the Tory Government resigned. Parnell hurried from America where he had founded the American Land League, leaving Dillon behind to attend to details. No man could have worked harder than Parnell during the elections. He was ubiquitous. The constituencies, Meath, Mayo and Cork City, vied for the honour of having him as representative. His nomination for Cork City was a piece of "political strategy." Parnell was wired to in the name of a friend asking him to accept nomination. Two hundred and fifty pounds was handed to his friend, Mr. Horgan, for expenses, and this sum was supposed to have been sent by Parnell. Mr. Horgan promptly paid fifty pounds of this sum to the sheriff. Parnell arrived in Cork. Then the plot was made manifest. The Tories wished to defeat the Whigs by a split vote. The tables were turned on them when Mr. T. M. Healy suggested that the two hundred pounds would go some way towards Parnell's election expenses. To the great disgust of the Tories Parnell was elected, and his election expenses defrayed in great part by their own money. He then got Mr. A. J. Kettle elected for Cork County, and followed up this triumph by success all over Ireland. Sixty-four Nationalists were elected. Of these Parnell was leader of thirty-six, who instead of joining the Liberals took their seats on the Opposition Benches. A Bill was introduced by Mr. O'Connor Power to compel landlords to compensate tenants for disturbance. This was taken up by Mr. Gladstone's new Liberal Chief Secretary, Mr. Forster, was watered down, made a Government measure, passed through the House of Commons, and contemptuously rejected by the Lords. Meanwhile, things had been moving in Ireland. "Hold the Harvest” had become a rallying cry. Mr. James Redpath, an American journalist, who had already risked life and fortune in the cause of human freedom, outlined at Claremorris the system afterwards

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